Are You Missing SEM Traffic?

Adwords Tools For Success

Today there are over 3.5 billion Google searches performed each day and around another 2 billion on Bing. Obviously, a lot of these searches are in no way going to provide useful traffic to your business and those who manage Search Engine Advertising try to use tools at their disposal to qualify clicks as far as possible (Ad messaging, the keywords that are bid on and the tightness of the match types used, amongst other things). But if you go too far in these efforts, it very possible to miss out on large amounts of searches and customers that are relevant to your business.

To ensure that you are reaching the largest amount of people that might be interested in what you have to offer, it’s important to consider the below growth options. They do often require more intensive management time to optimise but they can often be worth it.

Broad Match

Broad Match runs your campaigns on searches that aren’t necessarily in your keywords list, but would still be broadly relevant to the product or service that you offer. This can be refined significantly by using the “+” modifier next to a term in your keyword – where this is used, the term tagged with this will have to be present in the search that is matched – “mens fluffy +slippers” will match to “cheap slippers” but not “mens fluffy sweaters”, for example.

So by judiciously using this match type you can hope to win some ad space against the 1 in 6 searches that have never been seen before. You can also use this traffic to fish for repeated searches you haven’t yet bid on to add to your keyword list.

Phrase Match

Phrase Match: the ad shows when the user searches your keyword phrase with extra terms before and after or a close variation of the phrase itself. This is tighter than Broad but way broader than Exact Match and, when managed right – excluding Exact terms or bidding less than Exact – you can still get some valuable new traffic.

In addition to ads that are based on the keywords, Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) can create advertisements based on your website.

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads use your website to tailor advertisements to potential customers who are searching relevant keywords. Headlines are written and landing pages are chosen from your site automatically in order to be relevant to the search terms made by a user in real time. DSAs do not involve bidding on keywords, instead you nominate a section or sections of your website.

To ensure you don’t take traffic you’re rather have come through your keywords and other campaigns, you should bid less on DSAs than the broad keywords. The great part of this is that you will get traffic you may not get elsewhere and is a great way to take advantage of peak traffic periods. Also, if you just don’t have the staff resources to look after a large product portfolio, DSAs can help get you some relevant ads without needing to construct and manage massive keyword collections.

To get the best out of DSAs, though, you do need to add lots of negative keywords and manage your bids carefully.

So these types of approach can get you some useful, cheap, and otherwise missed extra traffic and sales for you. The main thing to bear in mind, however, is that they all take a bit more manual nuancing to make them work and they won’t work perfectly (e.g. profitably) right out of the gate.

If you would like to hear more about how these advertisements can benefit your campaigns, tweet at us @ESV_Digital_UK or follow us on LinkedIn.